Thursday 28 August 2014

The Fall of January Cooper By Audrey Bell


Some books need to be released in segments or edited to focus on the more important points. This was one of them.

Did January Cooper fall? In a sense.

January Copper is a walking, talking, contradiction. She is ditsy but intelligent and has more confidence than can be written about. She is also the definition of crazy, mean girl, Queen B and every other snob/diva related title you can find. She pulls it off so well though, that you can't help but to love her.

Let's get honest though, January Cooper was technically down on her luck for maybe 5 minutes. Yes, she does loses a lot but living like the average college students is still better than being unable to even attend college. There are a lot of discrepancies with this story but the characters personalities and series of events occasionally overshadow the underlying issues.

The relationship factor of this novel is too fast and small of a window for me to take it seriously. They make really good frenemies but I can't relate to their "passionate" moments or the times they decide to be a "couple", because I spent 76% of this novel interacting with them as friends. Their relationship by then needed time to grow into more and we also needed some of that time to understand and re-establish them in my mind as a couple.

I don't fully understand Christian's guilt and reasoning but I feel like his story is a unique one that needed more light. I'm not asking for dreams from the grave but his story needed more elaboration. We spent so much time having random conversations that led to literally nothing but filling a space and I kept thinking about all the things we could have learned about him in that time period.

On top of all that, I left this story feeling like it wasn't ready to end. We are moving slow and building to the end then in the last 10% it's one big rush. I, for one, kept checking the percentage, waiting to see when they would seal the deal, until I just called it a pipe dream and gave up. You can then imagine how shocked I was to see that there really was going to be a coupling.

Surprisingly, I liked the cattiness of the females in this novel because it was a true representation of their social circle. I believed every character profile and I love how the hero wasn't glorified. He was a regular middle class guy who once dominated college hockey.

The flow of this story is nice and has really great transitions. However, somewhere on the way to the end, it all got lost and the story felt like being short changed. Still, I liked the characters and I think the writing wasn't bad either, with the exception of a few grammatical errors. It's a quick read with an engaging story and though it's not perfect, it wasn't a failure either.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22552788-the-fall-of-january-cooper

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